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PONSSE UK LTD 25 YEARS
by Ponsse Plc
CELEBRATES ITS 25th ANNIVERSARY THIS YEAR
The Ponsse Plc subsidiary witnessed its first forest machine heading into the woods in the United Kingdom in 1994, and the company has since solidified its position as a significant operator in the forest industry. Two years later, Ponsse UK opened service centres in Beattock in Scotland and Neath in Wales. As demand grew, operations were centralised in Lockerbie in Scotland. Ultimately, the need arose to centralise operations closer to customers, and the town of Annan in Scotland was finally selected as the location for a state-of-the-art service centre, which opened in 2017. Twenty-six employees work in the service centre’s repair facility. In addition to spare parts sales and storage facilities, the service centre includes training facilities for customers, operators and personnel.
The facilities were designed particularly to meet the service notes of forest machines. Gray Glendinning, managing director of Ponsse UK, says: “In the future, we hope to grow the Ponsse UK team even more to ensure we can provide even better customer service and become the leader in the forest machine market here in the UK.”
Throughout the company’s 25 years of operation, personnel training and development have been key.
THREE MEMBERS OF THE TEAM HAVE MORE THAN 20 YEARS’ EXPERIENCE Kris Stitt was happy to be accepted as an apprentice at Ponsse UK in 1997. After graduating from Newton Rigg College, Kris started working as a repair and a field maintenance engineer. Later, he was promoted to supervisor. Four years ago, Kris was promoted again and now works in technical maintenance support.
Ian Stitt has also worked for the company since 1997. He was a spare parts manager for 17 years before transferring to maintenance administrative tasks in 2014.
Ponsse UK’s managing director Gary Glendinning also has a long and successful Ponsse career. He started as a maintenance engineer in 1997 and worked for Ponsse North America for two years. After returning to the UK, he was promoted to service manager, and in 2018, he was selected as the area director for Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Italy, Turkey and Greece. Gary is still one the leaders of the company in UK, as he was made the managing director of Ponsse UK Ltd and Ponsse Machines Ireland Ltd earlier this year.
In the UK, around 18.5 million cubic metres of trees are felled each year. Around 120 forest machines are sold annually, and more than 1,300 machines are currently in active use.
